Contents

Game concept

You are a member of a team, either red or blue, assigned to you
at random when you connect. Your goal is to help your team to
win, by capturing the enemy flag. To capture the flag, a member
of your team must steal the enemy flag and bring it to your
team’s flag, provided your flag has not been stolen already.

There can also be several red or blue flags or even green flags in some maps. The green flags can usually be captured by either team but on some servers you may also capture the enemy flag on them. The majority of the maps have only one blue and one red flag though.

The best strategy when you are carrying a flag is usually to go near your team’s base, so when your flag is returned, you can capture the enemy flag without too much delay. Avoid bringing the flag back to the enemy and giving them an easy capture.

The game can be capture or time limited. You can see that in the server info screen by pressing F5.

Moving and shooting

You move by arrow keys or keypad. If you have a joystick, you can also use that for moving by first setting it up in the controls menu. Shift is for running and alt for strafing, that means your gun won’t turn. You shoot with control keys. Notice that if you get hit, you can’t shoot for a second.

At the bottom left of the screen are the health and energy bars.
If your health drops to zero, you die. Energy is used for
running, shooting and health protection when you have the
shield powerup. Health and energy regenerate to 200 with time.

If you want to make a suicide, which is sometimes useful when you have a deathbringer powerup, press delete. To drop the flag to your teammate, you don’t have to kill yourself. Simply just press page down.

Minimap

On the upper-right corner of the screen is the minimap. It
shows your teammates and the opponents seen by them. If you
have the shadow powerup, it shows all the opponents who don’t
have the shadow themselves.

Powerups

If you see an item lying on the ground, grab it. It is a special
powerup item.

Powerup

Description

weapon upgrade

You get an additional rocket up to the server limit and more energy.

turbo

You get more speed (time limited).

shadow

You become invisible and see opponents on the minimap (time limited).

weapon power

Your shots make more damage (time limited).

megahealth

You get more health and energy (up to 300).

shield

Your health is protected while the shield lasts, that is as long as you have energy. One-hit shield can take only one hit though. You also get some energy with this powerup.

deathbringer

Damage players on the same room when you die.

Map list

The map list of the server can be seen by pressing F2. The current map is in yellow. You can also see the number of votes for each map. Your own vote is indicated by an asterisk ‘*’.

On the same list, you can vote for the next map by typing the map number and pressing enter. If you want to vote to end the current game, press F8. More than half of the players is needed to end the game.

The next map is chosen according to the votes. If several maps have an equal number of votes (non-zero), the next map is the one that was last played the longest time ago. If no maps have any votes, the next map in the list will be played.

Chatting

Chatting is quite straightforward: type your message and hit enter. Then your message will be sent to everyone. If you want to talk only to your team, begin the message with a dot. In 1.0.3 you will see a ‘Say team’ text to indicate the team talk.

Console commands

The chat input is used for console commands too. The commands begin with a slash.

Screenshot

You can take a screenshot of the game with F11. The image is saved in the PCX format in the screens directory with a name outgxxx.pcx where xxx is an increasing number. The size of the image is the same as your game screen and the colour depth is 24 bits. If you want to use the image in the web, convert it to PNG. You can usually also decrease the colour depth to 8 bits without much loss in the quality while saving space.

Key summary

Controls

Move

arrow keys or keypad

Shoot

Control

Run

Shift

Strafe

Alt or Alt Gr

Other keys

Talk

Just type your message and hit Enter.

Team talk

Begin your message with a dot (‘.’).

Change team

End

Suicide

Delete

Drop flag

Page Down

Show more messages

Insert

Show pings

Tab

Toggle names

Control+F3

In-game help

F1

Map list

F2

Team stats

F3

Player stats

F4

Server info

F5

Vote map change

F8

Screenshot

F11

Toggle fullscreen

Alt+Enter

Increase lag

P+keypad plus

Decrease lag

P+keypad minus

The purpose of increasing lag is to even the game by introducing a handicap. Of course, you can’t decrease it below your normal lag.